Suppose There Is NO Other Life in the Universe – A New Look at the Drake Equation

So why do I call my Revelation series a “new kind of science fiction?’

The reason is that it’s just different. For example, what other science fiction book uses the premise that life exists no were else in the universe? Not many, I’ll bet.

Space Looks Pretty Empty

Just about everyone, including most very well known scientists/TV stars, believe that there is other life out there. Many of them think the universe is teaming with life.

They may be right about that, but there is no way to know for sure. It’s just a guess on their part – a guess normally made using a probability argument. You’ve heard it; it goes like this: “There are so many stars and planets, the odds say there MUST be other life out there.”

A scientist named Drake even came up with a fancy sounding equation to help calculate how much life might be out there. He did this in 1961 and it’s still being sited, over 50 years later. I’ll spare you the details, but basically Drake said that you just needed to know how many potentially habitable planets there were. You then multiplied that number by the probability that life would appear on a planet.

Therefore, if you had a million planets and you decided that the odds of life appearing is 10%, you could reasonably expect to have 100,000 planets with life on them.

The math is easy, but there’s a pretty gigantic hole in this equation isn’t there? Guessing the number of planets is not unreasonable, but how does one go about guessing the probability that life will appear? You may guess it’s 1% and I may guess it’s 50%. It could be anything. It’s messy and, ultimately, meaningless.

Suppose the true odds are infinitesimally small, so small that there could never be enough planets to make it likely that there’s life anywhere else.

Or . . . suppose the odds are an even smaller number yet. Suppose they are zero. If you multiply any number of planets by a zero chance of life, you’ll always end up with zero.

“Wait, just wait!” I can hear you now. “It can’t be zero because we KNOW life exits on at least one planet.”

That’s true, but this argument assumes that life on Earth is a result of probabilities. That’s what scientists believe after all. However, suppose that’s not right.

Suppose life exits on Earth, not due to an act of chance, but an act of will.